Farmland.

Farmland.

There's something refreshing about that word. A promise of hope. Hope of future meals. Hope of hard-won knowledge being passed forward. Hope for mankind.

Without land, it's difficult to grow enough food to sustain human life.

This gets me to thinking on the individual scale. Could I sustain myself and keep myself alive without a garden? I suppose I could do hydroponics inside the RV...or on the outside of the RV. I just watched a short reel about a guy who used old metal vegetable cans stuck to a sheet of fencing to make a small wall garden. He punched drainage holes in the bottom of the cans and planted herbs. Maybe I could hang a contraption like that on the outside of the RV for the times when I'm parked.

I need/want some land. I have a vision for a little cabin with a woodburning stove. It's actually more like a Home Depot shed. I can import water into a holding tank and operate a system like that of the RV. Of course, I'll have to figure out the whole septic thing, too. The plan for power is solar. Over these last seven years, I've learned that I can live on minimal electricity. Solar will do.

But farmland...

This farmland at the confluences of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois Rivers wakes the urge to plant...and grow.

People used to plant seeds. Unadulterated, non-hybrid seeds. Nothing genetically modified. Just pure seeds that produce pure food. If we keep messing with plant life, we're going to have a big problem on our hands in the not-too-distant future. Genetically modified and hybrid foods usually can't reproduce. The seed supplier wants to make sure you buy seed every year. This keeps him in business, feeding the beast.

If you do plant, buy organic, non-modified seed. Keep the seeds; plant them next year. Reap the produce and a harvest of new seed for the following year. This is how it's been done for the last 5,000 or 6,000 years as civilizations learned to cultivate crops.

Grocery stores are a relatively new invention when examined in the entire scope of humankind. While I haven't done extensive research into grocery stores, a small-scale research project revealed the first grocery store starting in the 1800s...1859, to be exact, with The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, Inc., which later became known as the A&P:

The company’s history traces to 1859, when George F. Gilman and George Huntington Hartford founded the Great American Tea Co. in New York City to trade in tea bought from the cargoes of the clipper ships. Initially a mail-order operation, it began opening retail stores in the 1860s. The company was renamed Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company in 1870. By 1881 its stores extended as far west as St. Paul, Minnesota, and as far south as Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia. Soon coffee, spices, and extracts were added to the sales. (Britannica)

While A&P started more as a trade route, an enterprising man, Clarence Saunders, established the Piggly Wiggly grocery concept to Memphis, Tennessee in 1916. In the grand scheme of human civilization, 1916 wasn't that long ago.

Before these large corporations, it was the little general stores, which sprung up as a response to westward expansion in the United States, a symbol of American enterprise. With these stores, the locals still provided the food. It wasn't mass manufactured.

But supplying the locals was not a one-way proposition, because the farmers and homesteaders also supplied the General Store. My husband talked to an old fellow who had run such a store years before, and was told that folks would bring in everything from eggs to live chickens, a spare bucket of milk, any surplus produce, and sell or barter with the merchant, who had to be willing to take such provender at any time from the community that supported his business. (Bamberger-Scott)

People used to plant gardens. Their surplus supplied the community store.

Which leads us back to farmland...

The saying that the corn should be "knee high by July," is an understatement. This year, I arrived in the farmland in mid-June. Some of this corn was already six-feet tall and tassling. That's because it's genetically-modified corn. I saw the hybrid sign at the end of the field. The signs signal when special seed is being used in a field. It provides advertising for the seed manufacturer.

The seed manufacturer.

Somethings not right with that statement. God should be the only seed manufacturer. Mankind stands too much to lose by playing with things on a genetic level.

Mankind stands too much to lose on the grander scale when you consider cloud seeding, which has been going on since the 1940s. Yes, chemtrails are a real thing. Even Bill Gates wants to get in on the action by seeding clouds in order to block the sun and prevent global warming. You can read about it here and here. What could go wrong?

Farmland...why is it all so complex when it doesn't have to be?